The Science of Leadership and Performance

Why do smart people fail? Why do technically brilliant individuals have trouble managing others and collaborating on a team? It is not because they lack intelligence or technical skills. Far from it. What they lack is a critical level of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and the ability to manage their own emotions and others’ when they are under pressure.

Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

Whether you are a formal manager or want to increase your individual performance (or both), this program will teach you the foundational principles and brain science of Emotional Intelligence (EI).

Focusing on managing your emotions under pressure, this program will enable you to increase your personal leadership by learning how to manage your emotional brain in your most difficult moments. This will allow you to influence and engage others, and connect with them in a more meaningful way.

In this program, you will:

Learn the brain science of emotions that drives your behavior under pressure

Increase your awareness of the situations that put you at risk of having your emotions lead to unskillful behavior and poor decisions

Have the option to utilize our state-of-the-art EI360 feedback assessment to increase self-awareness of the 11 key EI competencies that drive your success

Learn practical strategies to help you respond more skillfully as pressure, tension and complexity increase

Identify patterns, triggers and emotional habits that either drive or derail your performance

Learn to suspend judgment – become ‘more curious and less certain’ – to effectively engage and influence others

Understand how to be an effective coach and help others develop the skills to perform under pressure

Practice techniques through interactive exercises and develop an action plan to put those strategies into practice

Emotional Intelligence can often sound “soft and squishy”, especially to highly analytical and technical audiences. Well, it turns out that’s one of our areas of expertise – engaging people who are more analytical in nature in order to develop their Emotional Intelligence. We do this through our EI training programs by ensuring they:

Clearly outline the business case for developing emotional intelligence

Are grounded in brain science and research on human behavior and performance

Are applicable to the challenging situations and relationships people face every day

“Because of the furious pace of change in business today, difficult to manage relationships sabotage more business than anything else – it is not a question of strategy that gets managers and leaders into trouble, it is a question of emotions.”

Companies who invest in developing their managers’ emotional intelligence will see these behaviors demonstrated:

They are able to listen to others without jumping to conclusions

They are able to admit to their mistakes and take personal accountability

They are able to remain calm under pressure and keep everyone around them calm

They are able to receive feedback and criticism without becoming defensive

When coaching, they connect to the emotions that drive people’s behaviors

They do not avoid difficult conversations and are able to hold people accountable in a motivating way

Performing Under Pressure:

Pressure changes how the brain functions; it diminishes our cognitive success tools – our ability to think, deal with change, make decisions, focus and pay attention. Most people take a haphazard approach to dealing with their pressure moments. Our study of 12,000 people showed the top 10% performers have insight about their pressure moments and situations, and use strategies to be their best under pressure.

Focusing on managing your thinking under pressure, this program will provide you with techniques and tools to help you overcome the sabotaging effects of pressure so you can think clearly and strategically, make decisions, perform complex tasks and lead others when there is change and pressure.

In this program, you will learn:

How to better manage pressure so it becomes a competitive advantage for you in growing your career and in helping your organization drive performance

Research from our study of 12,000 people and what the top 10% did to excel under pressure

Three pressure insights that will help you avoid the sabotaging effective of pressure

Stories of leaders and organizations who have managed pressure effectively to succeed

How pressure affects your brain and strategies you can use to perform under pressure in the moment

Longer term ‘COTE of Armor’ (Confidence, Optimism, Tenacity, Enthusiasm) strategies that help inoculate you against pressure and increase your confidence as you walk into a pressure situation

This program is based on the ground breaking book, Performing Under Pressure, The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most, published by Crown Business/Penguin Random House in February, 2015. For this New York Times bestselling book, co-authored by noted psychologist Hendrie Weisinger and IHHP’s J.P. Pawliw-Fry and , IHHP undertook a seven year study of more than 12,000 subjects from around the world. We learned what the top 10% performers do to succeed under pressure!

The Three Conversations of Leadership

People want to make relationships work with their managers, teams, and peers. They want to give formal and informal feedback that improves accountability, clarity and performance. They want to bring their ideas and concerns to the table regardless of who is in the room. What is surprising is the lack of skill and ability most people have to step into the difficult conversations they know they need to have.

Focusing on having effective conversations under pressure, this program will help people conduct daily, difficult and courageous conversations that cultivate teamwork, build connected relationships, and help global, highly matrixed, virtual teams learn to influence and collaborate more skillfully.

In addition to helping you have high-pressure and difficult conversations, you will also gain insight that when you are under pressure, you often have less effective daily conversations, which can erode trust and connection in your key relationships.

This program has been designed for people who are in formal leadership positions and responsible for both the performance and on-going development of their direct reports. This program builds on the foundation of Emotional Intelligence and will enable you to:

Understand the importance and impact of three critical types of conversations: Daily, Difficult and Courageous Conversations

Leverage insight from the brain science of emotions to have more effective conversations

Learn techniques to have high impact daily coaching conversations that build trust and drive results, even in time-constrained, pressure-filled environments

Practice having difficult conversations in a way that allows you to speak your truth and get to the “last 8%”, while not emotionally triggering the other person. Examples include:

Engaging people by creating emotional connection when rolling out change

Delivering bad news or saying “no” in a way that ensures a person is still valued and understands the message

Providing continuous coaching about behavior, performance and impact

Managing up and across when we have limited or no direct authority

Understand the importance of having a developmental mindset so you can coach people to the next level of performance

There comes a time when we need to have a difficult conversation in the workplace. This program will provide you with the knowledge and techniques required to have the critical conversations that you know you need to have. These kinds of conversations are never easy, but we need the skills to have them in order to consistently drive performance.

ABOUT IHHP

IHHP is a research-based training company and has been a leader in Emotional Intelligence for over twenty years.

We build integrated programs with training, assessments and coaching based on neuroscience for real change. We translate the science behind managing emotions and teach people the skills to summon their best selves and do their best work during moments of truth.